Travels, thoughts and talks of Abdurraheem Green

Naomi Klein is the author of two books that I consider to be essential reading. Both have had a profound impact on me and I highly recommend them.

I was introduced to this extraordinary author when I found her book "No Logo" on a seat on the tube.

I could barely put it down. It introduced me to how labels and brands arose and what terrible injustices were being done by brands to workers in sweat shops in the third world. It deserves a review, and inshallah I will cover this book in more depth sometime.

Her next book was even more impressive, and I don't know why it has not received wider acclaim. "The Shock Doctrine" explains what is behind the concept of shock and awe that was unleashed upon Iraq by Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld and the neo-cons. It is truly shocking! Inshallah, I hope I get to write a more detailed review of that also.

Now I have started her latest work "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate" and so far it has not disappointed. I really think man made climate change is one of the most important issues facing humanity today, and almost everything else is a distraction.

If you haven't already read my article on Islam's stance on this issue you can read it here:

In the meantime I think this topic is so important and this book so impressive I'll be posting a few choice quotations from the book as I read it and perhaps making some comments. Lets start with this:

“You have been negotiating all my life.” So said Canadian college student Anjali Appadurai, as she stared down the assembled government negotiators at the 2011 United Nations climate conference in Durban, “In that time, you’ve failed to meet pledges, you’ve missed targets, and you’ve broken promises.” In truth, the intergovernmental body entrusted to prevent “dangerous” levels of climate change has not only failed to make progress over its twenty-odd years of work it has overseen a process of virtually uninterrupted backsliding"

Monday, 13 October 2014

Drought and famine will continue to be used as pretexts to push genetically modified seeds, driving farmers further into debt. And, in the name of “national security,” we will intervene in foreign conflicts over water, oil, and arable land, or start those conflicts ourselves. In short our culture will do what it is already doing, only with more brutality and barbarism, because that is what our system is built to do.

The corporate quest for natural resources will become more rapacious, more violent. Arable land in Africa will continue to be seized to provide food and fuel to wealthier nations, unleashing a new stage of neocolonial plunder layered on top of the most plundered places on earth

Sunday, 12 October 2014

What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate by Naomi Klein

our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate by Naomi Klein

large parts of the climate movement wasted precious decades attempting to make the square peg of the climate crisis fit into the round hole of deregulated capitalism, forever touting ways for the problem to be solved by the market itself.

The twin signatures of this era have been the mass export of products across vast distances (relentlessly burning carbon all the way), and the import of a uniquely wasteful model of production, consumption, and agriculture to every corner of the world (also based on the profligate burning of fossil fuels). Put differently, the liberation of world markets, a process powered by the liberation of unprecedented amounts of fossil fuels from the earth, has dramatically sped up the same process that is liberating Arctic ice from existence.

Friday, 10 October 2014

When historians look back on the past quarter century of international negotiations, two defining processes will stand out. There will be the climate process: struggling, sputtering, failing utterly to achieve its goals. And there will be the corporate globalization process, zooming from victory to victory: from that first free trade deal to the creation of the World Trade Organization to the mass privatization of the former Soviet economies to the transformation of large parts of Asia into sprawling free-trade zones to the “structural adjusting” of Africa. There were setbacks to that process, to be sure—for example, popular pushback that stalled trade rounds and free trade deals. But what remained successful were the ideological underpinnings of the entire project, which was never really about trading goods across borders—selling French wine in Brazil, for instance, or U.S. software in China. It was always about using these sweeping deals, as well as a range of other tools, to lock in a global policy framework that provided maximum freedom to multinational corporations to produce their goods as cheaply as possible and sell them with as few regulations as possible—while paying as little in taxes as possible. Granting this corporate wishlist, we were told, would fuel economic growth, which would trickle down to the rest of us, eventually. The trade deals mattered only in so far as they stood in for, and plainly articulated, this far broader agenda. The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending. Much has been written about the real-world costs of these policies—the instability of financial markets, the excesses of the super-rich, and the desperation of the increasingly disposable poor, as well as the failing state of public infrastructure and services. Very little, however, has been written about how market fundamentalism has, from the very first moments, systematically sabotaged our collective response to climate change, a threat that came knocking just as this ideology was reaching its zenith.

The World Bank also warned when it released its report that “we’re on track for a 4°C warmer world [by century’s end] marked by extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.” And the report cautioned that, “there is also no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible.”

OK please think what “there is also no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible” means.

Simply put, life systems as we know them could collapse catastrophically. That equals starvation. That equals mass deaths. Most probably would not even be caused by actual famine. More people would die from war and conflict. If this happens on a massive enough scale people will migrate in vast numbers to parts of the world where they think they will be able to survive. The developed world is delusional and needs to study history if it thinks it can some how ring fence itself in. The world as we know will end.

Throughout the summit, this young man had been the picture of confidence and composure, briefing dozens of journalists a day on what had gone on during each round of negotiations and what the various emission targets meant in the real world. Despite the challenges, his optimism about the summit’s prospects never flagged. Once it was all over, however, and the pitiful deal was done, he fell apart before our eyes. Sitting in an overlit Italian restaurant, he began to sob uncontrollably. “I really thought Obama understood,” he kept repeating.

I have come to think of that night as the climate movement’s coming of age: it was the moment when the realization truly sank in that no one was coming to save us. The British psychoanalyst and climate specialist Sally Weintrobe describes this as the summit’s “fundamental legacy”—the acute and painful realization that our “leaders are not looking after us we are not cared for at the level of our very survival.” No matter how many times we have been disappointed by the failings of our politicians, this realization still comes as a blow. It really is the case that we are on our own and any credible source of hope in this crisis will have to come from below?

The Messenger's of Allah faced similar challanges. Their message, far from being an opiate for the masses was a force for their liberation. The toughest opposition to the Messengers was always from the powers that be, the ruling elite, the establishment who could only see their challange to status quo as a threat.